Nov. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Canadian author Alice Munro opens her latest book, ``The View From Castle Rock,'' in a remote, rain- slicked Scottish churchyard, where she searches for the grave of an ancestor, Will O'Phaup.

Born in the 17th century, O'Phaup was famed for ``feats of frolic, agility and strength,'' reads the inscription on his headstone. He was also a storyteller, though Munro suggests that his tales of fairies and ghosts were shaped by smuggled brandy.

Fact or fiction? Hard to tell. Munro calls ``The View From Castle Rock'' her most autobiographical collection of stories to date. Yet it remains a mixture of history and invention even as it traces her family's journey from Scotland to the New World. Some of these tales exist ``within the outline of a true narrative,'' she says in the foreword; others pivot on crafty fabrications.

Munro is descended from a family of shepherds named Laidlaw who lived in the Ettrick Valley, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of the English border. A decade ago, she grew interested in her genealogy and discovered that this obscure, impoverished clan had left a long paper trail. She lays out the story in two parts, first piecing together her ancestry and then recalling her own upbringing on a hardscrabble farm in Ontario.

Based on letters, journals and memoirs, the stories in the first half read like superior local history. Multilayered narratives, they tell of lost babies, bold pioneers and fierce ministers. Munro glimpses a self-dramatizing streak in her staunchly Presbyterian forebears, and claims as another ancestor James Hogg, author and friend to Byron and Wordsworth.

Crossing in 1818

Yet she also seems strangely inhibited here, often interrupting herself just as the fiction begins to grip. ``When you write about real people you are always coming up against contradictions,'' she writes.

Will O'Phaup's grandson dreamed of immigrating to North America, and finally made the journey with three of his six children in 1818. Their crossing is recreated in the title story, a memorable shipboard narrative filled with the promise of looking forward and the melancholy of gazing back at loved ones left behind. It ends in another graveyard: the travelers' final resting place in Halton County, Ontario, close to Highway 401, ``which at that spot may be the busiest road in Canada.''

Part two, ``Home,'' comprises a series of stories rooted in Ontario, where Munro grew up on a poor farm west of Wingham, the eldest of three children.

`Hired Girl'

The claustrophobia of small-town life permeates ``Lying Under the Apple Trees'' in which she exchanges breathless kisses with a God-fearing stable boy. In ``Hired Girl,'' her wry wit sees her through a vacation job as a maid, where she's ignored by two houseguests her own age:

``They were the sort of girls who would have squealed and made a fuss over me, if I had been a dog or a cat,'' she says.

The final story, set in 1993, describes the scare Munro got when a mammogram detected what turned out to be a benign lump in her breast.

Munro's blurring of fact and fiction will doubtless trouble some readers; it results in a book that is neither reliable autobiography nor fully imagined fiction. Yet this tension between genres prompts some enlightening reflections on storytelling. ``The past needs to be approached from a distance,'' she writes.

In an epilogue, the 75-year-old author ponders our obsession with genealogy, noting that it tends to surface in old age. ``We are beguiled,'' she says, ``insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.''

Though these aren't Munro's strongest stories, they exude life even as they reflect on death. Told with vivid economy and defined by a searching emotional intelligence, they pay tribute to a people and a place.

``The View From Castle Rock'' is from Knopf in the U.S. and Chatto & Windus in the U.K. (349 pages, $25.95, 15.99 pounds).

(Hephzibah Anderson is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Hephzibah Anderson at hephzibah_anderson@hotmail.com.

Last Updated: November 8, 2006 00:07 EST